Heard of Hewlett-Packard's cooltown project? HP is hoping that making cooltown's building blocks freely available and Open Source under the GPL will bring publicity and progress to its “vision of a technology future where people, places, and things are first class citizens of the connected world, wired and wireless.” The CoolBase code will be announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and made available tomorrow.

HP has been working on cooltown in its labs for years. The concept is described by CNET:

In HP's vision, bus stops would broadcast schedule information, alarm clocks would wake people up according to their computer's calendar and a car could find the nearest gas station–and HP would sell many heavy-duty servers to power all these services.

Like Microsoft's .NET strategy, cooltown depends on mobile but connected users; unlike .NET (at least at this stage), cooltown also describes a world where “devices and services are federated and context-aware, and everything has a web presence.” Thus, the devices and appliances give you information instead of you just using them to get or transmit information.

To get the cooltown concept out of the labs and into practical applications, Gene Becker, director of the cooltown project, and Bruce Perens, HP's “open-source and Linux strategist,” decided to release about 150,000 lines of code under the CoolBase Open Source development project. Basic pieces of the code to be released include:

CoolBase Appliance Server: for serving Web pages and communicating with other computers

Esquirt: an API for sending URLs and Web services instructions to other Web-enabled devices

Web Presence Manager: for storing and displaying information about an object (e.g., what kind of gadgets a cooltown participant is carrying)

SAM'S OPINION
I'd never heard anything about cooltown before reading the CNET article … not surprising with such an awful name. The most salient comment I found in the article was a quote from analyst Stacey Quandt of Giga Information Group, who said: “A lot of companies seem to keep throwing technology over the wall under the GPL and thinking, 'We'll have the community build this for us.'” She is dead on with that statement, and it perfectly describes HP's lame-seeming move to put CoolBase code on the GPL. What so many people fail to realize is that while Open Source is a powerful and useful concept and practice, the reason why Linux is still the most famous Open Source project and why so few other Open Source initiatives have made as much of a splash is that the project has to be interesting, practical, and useful. The cooltown project sounds interesting, but doesn't really seem practical or useful at this stage, and I doubt you'll see much more activity on the cooltown developers' network than you do now. It might be very cool to use Esquirt to set up a beacon, but who's going to care if no one's there to receive the information? Yes, I know these projects are about what's coming in the future, but people who are doing programming for free aren't likely to bust their humps over something that's an undetermined length of time down the road. If you write a program for Linux you can use it today; if you write something for cooltown a techie in the HP Labs can send you a “thanks for participating” e-mail. Woo hoo.

That said, I do like the basic cooltown concepts, and was reminded immediately of the Experience Music Project in Seattle. EMP is an “interactive music museum” started by MS co-founder Paul Allen. Basically, you wander through this great museum filled with music memorabilia carrying a Museum Exhibit Guide (MEG) unit running Windows CE. You get to certain parts of the exhibits and the MEG downloads commentary and music you can navigate through with hyperlinks. There are lots of other cool techie stuff as well, with restaurants, live music, etc. Some of the Geek.com staff went there when we were in Seattle courtesy of Microsoft, and it was a great and very fun time, hampered slightly by WinCE technical problems (probably resolved by now).

To me, HP's cooltown sounds like EMP on a larger, broader scale. But the technical details that will have to be worked out across the board (infrastructure, devices, programming, usage) are pretty daunting at this point. I hope CoolBase's piggy-backing onto the Open Source movement will help advance the idea, but I'm not holding my breath.

USER COMMENTS 9 comment(s)

First post!!(9:55am EST Mon Jul 23 2001)I think that this sounds quite geeky and cool. I often forget to fill my gas tank and search for a station on e. Maybe you could use it as a geek locator service – by Frosty

Damn(2:24pm EST Mon Jul 23 2001)Another idea lifted, I had thought up of tracking city transit with GPS and conneting transit terminals with wireless devices that would show the people waiting the exact (or a good estimate) of how long they would have to wait. Also, on the bus or street car, there would be screens indicating how far it was till the next few stops, and which stop is next. I should have patented the idea!!! – by Ed

EMP(3:00pm EST Mon Jul 23 2001)Sam, I agree completely that this is very reminiscent of the Experience Music Project in Seattle. When I was in Seattle last year on business I made it a point to check this out and was far from disappointed. It's one of the coolest interactive, multimedia experiences you'll find in the present world and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who travels to Seattle. – by djhitman

Need more HP open source drivers(8:00pm EST Mon Jul 23 2001)HP is now talking the talk, now walk the walk. Release the open source drivers for previously unsupported devices such as the scanners or provide information to support it. I was going to buy a HP2100c but it is not supported under linux. – by EJ

Sam is wrong(12:54pm EST Tue Jul 24 2001)HP is not open sourcing CoolTown (CoolTown is a research project/vision). Rather, HP is open sourcing CoolBase, the developer's platform that enables mobile e-services. CoolBase is the catalyst to a pervasive computing environment. You can't open source a vision – But you can open source the means to achieve that vision.

SAM YOU NEED TO CHANGE YOUR HEADER IF YOU'RE GOING TO ACT AS A REPORTER. – by Chavez

Wow(11:46pm EST Wed Jul 25 2001)HP and Open source? Sounds good.I hope that other giant companies make their product open source. – by Hokishim

thanks(2:27pm EST Sat Jan 07 2006)This is an excellent site thanks for the information! – by andy